The Uncomfortable Fit:
Women's Spirituality and Patriarchal Religion

“Gender is a characteristic of human beings, of words and pictures, and often of the great archetypes of myth. But it is not, I suggest, a characteristic of God.” —Jenny Goodman

As women, we are often led away from a feeling of spiritual connectedness and into frustration, shame, or anger when we dwell on the issues that result from the patriarchal structure of our churches, temples, and meditation halls. The situation begins with a pervasive lack of representation of women and the feminine in almost every aspect of traditional religions, supported and reinforced by masculine God-language in the Judeo-Chris-tian scripture and liturgies, language which results in a host of ideas that patriarchy claims to be “natural.” The Christian vision of a god “out there” rather than within produces negative attitudes toward embodiment in general and female sexuality in particular—attitudes that have far-reaching consequences both personally and culturally. A basic inequality of women and denigration of the feminine in established religions also leads to disputes concerning the ordination of women as priests, preachers, and rabbis; homophobia; sexual abuse in religious communities; and to the idea that as man serves his god, so woman should submit to her man. These issues— and this is just the short list—often create a conscious or unconscious barrier between women and the church or women and their indwelling spirit.

Upstream of all these issues—transcendence versus embodiment, male superiority versus female inferiority—lies the larger problem of dualism, so pervasive in our culture that it seems to disappear into unquestioned acceptance. In addition to the basic problem of dualism—the positing of everything in terms of polar opposites—we tend to choose one side against the other. For instance, male/female has become aligned in our culture with such other polarized concepts as mind/body, superior/inferior. This type of black-and-white thinking becomes automatic, leaving out the complexity of individuals and the reality of shifting, changing situations. Dualism can be transcended through meditation, not through argument or analysis. If we work with the fundamental duality of self and other in deep meditation and contemplation, if we can learn to unify the subject that perceives with the objectified world, then other polarities lose their potency. To become conscious of our tendency toward dualism forms the first step in overcoming it.

 

Good Question

Dear God, are boys betters than girls? I know you are one but try to be fair.

Children’s Letters to God, Compiled by Eric Marshall and Stuart Hample

~ What other questions could we ask God concerning gender? Try to be fair.

“She [Lilith] represents to us our innermost herstory.In reclaiming Her, we women throw off and pour away forever the poison about ourselves, our so-called inferiority, our evil inner selves, our guilt. On reclaiming Lilith we reclaim the breath of life that emerges as we give birth to our children, to our works of all kind; we reclaim our wisdom, our knowledge, our power, our autonomy.”—Astrophel P. Long

Long before the goddess became part of feminist consciousness, the women’s movement celebrated Lilith, whose story is found in biblical Apocrypha. Lilith, the first wife of Adam and the original wild woman, rejected her second-class status symbolized by the “missionary position,” and disappeared into the Void to be replaced by the submissive (but manipulative) Eve. Under patriarchal interpretation, Lilith became a demon who haunted children and pregnant women, thus inverting the “good mother” role. Unlike the Hindu goddess Kali, who incorporates both creation and destruction, Lilith became a dark destroyer in Judaism and “Queen of the Witches” in Christian tradition. Recent scholarship relates Lilith to goddess worship, to “wind” or “breath” or “spirit,” thus connecting her to the African goddess Oya as well as to the “space” aspect of such Eastern goddesses as Kwan Yin and the Tibetan feminine spirits known as dakinis. Feminist psychological interpretation sees Lilith as “the breath of life, ” the symbol of women’s wisdom and power which has become a source of evil under patriarchy: in short, a fitting patron saint for the women’s movement.

LILITH

Lilith glared at God “I’ll not go back,”

She hissed at him— “Adam is such a bore.”

“That was my plan You willful wench.

Lie down—

I’ll tell you more.”

Anon

Reclaim Lilith by becoming conscious of her energy in your life. Begin not just by reading one of the many books available on the subject (see Bibliograph) but by connecting with fierce women in person. Listen to their podcasts, go to retreats, conferences, form a small group of like-minded women. Use this or another book such Women Who Run With the Wolve: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes as a starting point.

 

“We open the pages of our sacred texts and we read mostly about the lives of men. The prophet is a woman who breaks the silence of history by speaking women’s names into the void. ” —Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb

 

Although writer Rachel Altman’s parents survived the Nazi death camps in Poland, many of her other relatives died in the Holocaust.

Procession of Women

In Jewish life women are the guardians of tradition—family, values, morality. In the old country, men sat for hours discoursing and arguing the Talmud, the book in which the law is encoded. But it fell to the women to insist that people behave as they should—as a mensch, a human being, should. The rituals of Jewish life and religious practice are not reserved for the synagogue; built into the liturgy are prayers to be spoken on awakening, prayers to be said when washing the hands, when seeing a rainbow, when eating a meal—prayers to be recited in the midst of life. In its purest form, Judaism brings us into an atmosphere of appreciation and awareness of every moment of life as sacred. At the center of Jewish life is the home, and at the center of the home is the woman.

At the same time, Judaism has discriminated against women: in Jewish mythology and tradition, women are given a clearly second-rate status and until recently, we have been excluded from the study of Talmud and the rabbinate.

In thinking about the women in my family—in allowing myself to feel a longing to be part of their world—I recognize a certain irony. I bemoan the loss of my family [in the holocaust], of the Jewish world that existed in Eastern Europe before the war, with a grief that will never be assuaged. However, as a modern woman, I acknowledge that the Eastern European shtetl is not a world in which I would choose to live.

How different my grandmothers’ lives were from mine! How can I—a woman who is educated and has explored options; a woman whose marriage was not arranged; a woman with rights, living in a time when a woman can choose to actively confront discrimination, can even become a rabbi—pretend to know them, these women who sat separate from men in the shul, who walked down narrow streets and bargained with shopkeepers, who raced home to complete the preparations for the Sabbath before the sun went down, who kept the children quiet so their husbands’ studies would not be disturbed? How can I pretend to know my grandmother Miryam, who was pregnant for thirteen years of her life, who lived at the mercy of an illness that could not be named (though today it could probably easily be treated), whose life revolved around stretching a tiny piece of meat to provide food for fifteen people, while her husband sat at the kitchen table and prayed?

When 1 visited Israel in 1971, my aunt Chava invited me for Shabbat dinner. She made a point of telling me that she was not an observant Jew, that the dinner would be a secular celebration. At sundown, as is traditional, she lit the candles, her head covered with a shawl, her hands covering her face as she recited the prayer. Afterward, she turned to me sheepishly and said, “Since the war, I no longer believe in God. Every Friday night I light the candles and say the blessing over them, but 1 do not do it for God. I do it for the memory of my mother.”

Like Chava, I am not an observant Jew, but I light candles on Friday night to usher in the Sabbath. 1 enjoy the peace that the ritual brings to my household, and I appreciate this weekly reminder to be grateful for the beauty of the creation. Also, it is a way of knowing them—the women of my family, the mothers and grandmothers and

aunts and daughters who, in the midst of hunger, illness, war, persecution, brought light to the darkness. I visualize a procession of them, a line reaching back in time and forward from this moment. Covering my head with a scarf, circling my hands over the flames three times and reciting the blessing. I join this procession of women, welcoming their spirit into my life, into my daughter’s life.

Rachel Altman

“Fragments of a Broken Past” in Different Voices: Women of the Holocaust

Jewish women are actively trying to reclaim their religious roots, attempting to reshape Jewish memory and history so that the female and the feminine will be included in the liturgies, blessings, and midrash (storytelling). In addition, there are several different versions of a feminist Haggadah in circulation, and a large number of “moon groups”: women who celebrate the new-moon holiday Rosh Hodesh, as a female ritual. Good resources are:

Pinina Adleman, Miriam’s Well: Rituals for Jewish Women Around the Year, Biblio Press, 1986.

Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Knopf, 1993.

Evelyn Torten Beck, ed., Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, The Crossing Press, 1984.

Ellen Bernstein, Let the Earth Teach You Torah: A Guide to Teaching Jewish Ecological Wisdom, Shomrei Adamah, 1992.

Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law: An Exploration of Women’s Issues In Halakhic Sources, Schocken Books, 1984.

Phyllis Bird, “Images of Women in the Old Testament,” in Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, edited by Rosemary Reuther, Simon and Schuster, 1974.

Esther Broner, “Honor and Ceremony in Women’s Rituals,” in The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement, edited by Charlene Spretnak, Doubleday, Anchor Press, 1982.

Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, Yours in Struqqle, Long Haul Press, 1984.

Marcia Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings,” in Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ, Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, HarperSanFrancisco, 1989.

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Reconstruction of Christian Origins, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1983.

Rela M. Geffen, ed., Celebration & Renewal: Rites of Passage in Judaism, Jewish Publication Society, 1993.

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, “Prophecy and Spirituality: The Voice of Prophet Woman,” in The Spiral Path: Explorations in Women's Spirituality, edited by Theresa King, Yes International Publishers, 1992.

Lesley Hazelton, Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myths, Simon and Schuster, 1977.

Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist, Schocken Books, 1983.

Naomi Janowitz and Maggie Wenig, “Sabbath Prayers for Women,” in Womanspirit Rising, edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, Harper & Row, 1979.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, eds., The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology, Beacon Press, 1989.

Elizabeth Koltun, ed., The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, Schocken Books, 1976.

Lilith (magazine), Lilith Publications, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019.

Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, New York, KTAV Publishing House, 1967.

Alix Pirani, The Absent Mother: Restoring the Goddess to Judaism and Christianity, Mandala, 1991.

Judith Plaskow, “Jewish Memory from a Feminist Perspective,” in Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ, Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, HarperSan Francisco, 1989.

Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Susan Weidman Schneider, Jewish and Female: Choices and Changes in Our Lives Today, Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Tikkun (magazine), 5100 Leona Street, Oakland, CA 94619-3022.

Judith Romney Wegner, Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in Mishnah, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Ellen M. Umansky, “Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology: Possibilities and Problems,” Anima 10, Spring, 1984.

Personal Accountability to God

Let woman live as she should. Let her feel her accountability to her maker. Let her know that her spirit is fitted for as high a sphere as a man’s, and that her soul requires food as pure and exalted as his. Let her live first for God, and she will not make imperfect man an object of reverence and awe. Teach her responsibility as a being of conscience and reason, that all earthly support is weak and unstable, that her only safe dependence is the arm of omnipotence, and that true happiness springs from duty accomplished. Thus will she learn the lesson of individual responsibility for time and eternity, that neither father, husband, brother, or son, however willing they may be, can discharge her high duties of life, or stand in her stead when called into the presence of the great Searcher of Hearts at the last day.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Women’s Rights Seneca Falls, 1848

Almost a hundred years later, editors Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe have completed The Women’s Bible Commentary, John Knox Press, 1993, which covers the Old and New Testaments, plus the Apocrypha. For additional biblical scholarship from women see: Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s Bread blot Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation, Beacon, 1984; In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1983; Rose Kraemer’s Her Share of the Blessings, Oxford University Press, 1992; Carol Meyers’s Discovering Eve: AncientIsraelite Women in Context, Oxford University Press, 1991; and Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror: Literary Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, Augsburg Fortress, 1984.

“Does belief in the Bible as God’s revelation presume that it instructs women to reiterate in their current spiritual life the same socio-religious values that structured Semitic societies?" —Justin O’Brien

The work of contemporary feminists who wish to remain connected to their religious roots is to separate the essence of their traditions from the patriarchal systems that hauegrown up around them—not an easy task. But just as it is the duty of traditional religions to overcome their patriarchal oppression of women, it is the current task of feminists to develop compassion.

Religion and Contemporary Feminist Consciousness

If religion centers in Mystery, and Mystery transcends sex (Paul’s “in Christ there is neither male nor female” is a representative traditional line), then religious experience should transcend sex. In other words, the basal line in religion should be whether the person is open or closed, willing or unwilling to participate in Mystery. Nothing sexual draws this line. The radical honesty and love for which Mystery calls circumvent chromosomal differences. Yet it is also true that religious experience comes to persons who are sexed, and that sex colors its expressions. Naturally, experience and its expressions interweave. Further, most religious experience is mediated through one’s tradition. That is, the cultural assumption into which one is born sets up the kinds of religious experience one is likely to have. So while no major religion would deny that Mystery can touch one directly, how one interprets such a touch is usually circumscribed by what one’s tradition teaches. The glow of joy, the death of a child, the value of love, the role of sex, the way to peace, the place of self-denial—these manifold entries to Mystery normally are shaped or interpreted through a received tradition. What such traditions have said about the sexes, therefore, has shaped a great deal of what men and women have made of their best experiences— of their transforming insights, loves, and encounters with Mystery. One theme of this book, in fact, is that the religions have frustrated women’s access to equality under Mystery by larding their experiences with perceptions of social inferiority.

Contemporary feminists are acutely sensitive to social inferiority. Those feminists who are also religious (open to Mystery) are therefore haunted by a dilemma: Must I choose between my feminism and my religion? Many feminists do in fact feel that the religions are irredeemably sexist. For them the religious traditions are that much more inauthenticity that liberation must raze. On the other hand, some feminists feel that to cut themselves off from Mystery would be truncating. It is no “liberation,” they argue, to become dead-ended, dehumanized, separated from the beauty and power of a divinity that shows itself as love that can create and heal. So while they acknowledge much sexism within the religions, these feminists refuse to equate religion with oppression.

That is my position. Beyond doubt, the major religions of the world have a dubious record with regard to women. Beyond doubt, they have often been inauthentic mediators of religious experience. The very light and love within us that generate these judgments, however, are Mystery-borne—that is, religious. But because on occasion they have made possible this light and love, the religions have not been wholly corrupting. Part of our task, therefore, will be to winnow the wheat of authentic religion (genuinely liberating, viable yet) from the religions’ sexist chaff.

Still, the chaff will be very prominent. For example, Buddhist women could not head the religious community. Hinduism usually held women ineligible for salvation. Islam made a woman’s witness only half that of a man. Christianity called woman the weaker vessel, the more blurred image of the Image. Jewish men blessed God for not having made them women. Yet authentic religion, by each of these traditions’ central confessions, holds most blessed honesty and love, which are hardly sex-specified. Each of these traditions, therefore, is a mixed bag. It has oppressed women socially while liberating many of them mystically.

Thus the religions, because they enroll human beings, are complex. Authenticity and inauthenticity vie constantly for their souls. Indeed the two are dialectically related, for authenticity is not something one has or gets once and for all. Often it is just pulling away from inauthenticity. In fact, each time one pulls away, one sees the need for further withdrawal. So an authentic woman is one who keep plugging away at self-transcendence in knowing and loving, despite her inevitable setbacks of selfishness. So authentic religion is a tradition willing to pull itself out of the pits.

Denise Lardner Carmody, Women and World Religions

Positive, healthy anger provides energy to break through obstacles, find a solution, and move on. Anger that feeds on itself creates poison for oneself and for others. If you’re filled with counterproductive anger, go into the woods, pick up a stone, and hold it to your forehead. Push every angry thought out of your mind and into the stone. Rest. Now force any residual anger into the stone as well. Bury the stone or throw it into a stream.

Early on, feminists recognized that female spirituality could not be divorced from politics and that social action would be needed to reintegrate the feminine into our culture and religion. This combination of feminist politics and spirituality is referred to here as the womanspirit movement.

The Womanspirit Movement

The womanspirit movement seeks to reclaim the spiritual-political powers neglected or suppressed throughout the patriarchal era, to develop a feminist force that attacks the patriarchy from all directions, and to create new ways of being and relating. . . .

The womanspirit movement is a necessity, not a luxury. Without it, we are operating with only half our potential tools and power. What we think we want is based on what we think is possible; one of womanspirit’s most important functions is to create and implement a feminist vision. We need tools such as meditation, personal mythology, natural healing, dreamwork, study of matriarchal history and mythology, and ritual to reach beyond the possibility laid out for us by the patriarchy. We cannot wait until after the revolution for the new order to rise up, phoenix-like, out of the ashes of the old. We need to lay the groundwork now through lifetimes of hard work in researching, experimenting with, and practicing a new integration of “politics” and “spirituality.” We need new ways of healing, self-knowledge, self-power, new ways of being and relating to ourselves, one another, the Earth, and the cosmos. If we neglect them, we will create only a new version of the overly competitive, dualistic, rational, technological patriarchy.

Ultimately the goals of spirituality and of revolutionary politics are the same: to create a world in which love, equality, freedom, and fulfillment of individual and collective potential is possible. If we unite the two approaches to these common goals, we will experience this fulfillment.

Hallie Iglehart Austen,“The Unnatural Divorce of Spirituality and Politics” in The Politics of Women’s Spirituality

Just as creating peace includes more than opposing war, the womanspirit movement goes beyond attacking patriarchy to create new ways of being and relating which include love and healing. But how do we get there from here? How do we avoid “good girl” role playing to develop compassion that springs from the heart? How do we recognize when we are adjusting to the human needs of others and when we are simply in deep denial? Start by praying for wisdom, equanimity, and compassion for ourselves and others.

Some within the womanspirit movement turned to witchcraft as a way to heal the split that modern women feel between spirituality and effective power. Here a modern witch gives an entry from her “Book of Shadows,” a traditional “recipe book” of teachings and rituals used in witchcraft (also called Wicca or The Craft) ceremonies.

The Confession

We confess that we have all been captive to the masculine mystique and the feminine mystique. We have believed, either openly or somewhere deep within our psyches, that maleness is the measure of full humanity and femaleness in some mysterious way is flawed. We confess that we have only begun to understand how much damage we have done to ourselves and to each other under the sway of this mystique. Allowing our gender to define and limit our possibilities, we have disowned those qualities and needs and feelings in ourselves which do not fit. Thus alienated from ourselves, we have invested others with power and responsibility which belong to us alone. We confess that we are afraid of otherness, in those of the opposite sex as well as in those of our own. And we are afraid of our own otherness, those parts in ourselves that we have split off and do not claim, experiencing them as acting upon us from without.

We confess that we stand in need of cleansing in order that we might experience healing and wholeness.

So Be it., Patricia Eagle Book of Shadows

Quotes to Contemplate

“We hold that the revelation of the divine to the feminine psyche may not be wholly understandable to the masculine consciousness, for which reason it has been largely ignored, not taken seriously, or simply brought into conformity with the masculine psyche. ” —Bernadette Roberts

“If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.” —Sojourner Truth

“For too many people spirituality means being a ‘nicer’ person and loving a nebulous creator while fearfully retaining all the rules of morality and ideas of God they were ever taught. The accumulation of their old religious concepts often fester into moral guilt or self-righteousness, while effectively sapping strength from any new spiritual inspiration. ” —Theresa King

“Love is not a doctrine. Peace is not an international agreement. Love and Peace are beings who live as possibilities in us.” —M.C. Richards

“Judaism can have no pretense to being a universal religion, Jewish culture cannot think of itself as a truly human culture, until they have opened themselves to, and faced the challenge of, the individual and communal self-under-standing of women as women. Both Judaism and Jewish culture will, sooner or later, have to come to terms with the full weight and complexity presented by the lives of women—our particularity, our differences, the specificities of our experience with each other, with God, and with men. None of that can be articulated for us, understood for us, judged for us, defined for us, or explained to us, by men. ” —Shelia Shulman

“Perhaps Jewish women have been reluctant or ill-equipped to create a Jewish feminist theology, not out of insensitivity to personal experience or ignorance of Jewish tradition but out of their awareness of the potentially irreconcilable conflict between the two. ” —Ellen M. Umansky

“On the one hand, women can choose to accept our absence from Sinai, in which case we allow the male text to define us and our relationship to the tradition. On the other hand, we can stand on the ground of our experience, on the certainty of our membership in our own people. To do this, however, is to be forced to remember and recreate its history. It is to move from anger at the tradition, through anger to empowerment. It is to begin the journey toward the creation of a feminist Judaism.” —Judith Plaskow

"The task, therefore, involves not so much rediscovering new sources as rereading the available sources in a different key. The goal is an increase in ‘historical imagination. —Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza

Table of Contents from Keys to the Open Gate: Section Two

THE UNCOMFORTABLE FIT: WOMEN'S SPIRITUALITY AND PATRIARCHAL RELIGION

Good Question, 60 Children’s Letters to God

“Lilith,”60 Anonymous

Shekhinah I, 62 Sherry Ruth Anderson and Patricia Hopkins

Shekhinah II, 65 Marcia Falk

Procession of Women, 67 Rachel Altman

Personal Accountability to God, 71 Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Religion and Contemporary Feminist Consciousness, 72 Denise Lardner Carmody

The Womanspirit Movement, 74 Hallie Iglehart Austen

The Confession. 76 Patricia Eagle

On The Gnostic Gospels, 77 Kimberley Snow

Beyond God as Male and Female, 80 Jann Aldredge Clanton

Living as a Nun in the West, 84 Sylvia Wetzel

Women and Islam, 88 Rlffat Hassan

Changing of the Gods, 91 Naomi Goldenberg

Articulating the Vision, 93 Eleanor Rae and Bernice Marie-Daly

Christianity as Compost, 97Emily Culpepper

 

 

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